I’ve been reading "Softwar", a book about Larry Ellison and Oracle, and one thread stood out: his early push for Video-on-Demand.
In early/mid-90s Ellison tried:
⭐ Oracle Media Server + nCUBE parallel computers
⭐ Cable partnerships to stream movies directly to homes
⭐ Goal: interactive TV
But it failed because:
🛑 Home internet was too slow (pre-broadband - remember modems and DSL?)
🛑 Storage and computing were expensive
🛑 No standard streaming devices
🛑 Studio licensing roadblocks
Only later the required ingredients for streaming would appear:
⏳ in 2000s, broadband adoption
⏳ mid-2000s, better compression (H.264 published in 2004) and Content Delivery Networks
⏳ late-2000s, adaptive bitrate streaming over HTTP
⏳ then in the 2010s, smartphones, smart TVs, and global content licensing
So we've escaped an alternate universe where Larry Ellison owned "YouTube" or "Netflix" with content dominated by cable companies at the cost of having YouTube only in 2005 and Netflix only in 2007. 😅
Ellison’s early vision wasn’t wrong but the timing was. There was no infrastructure for another decade.
Even though that initiative failed commercially, it amplified Oracle’s visibility. It was the period when Ellison appeared frequently in the media, positioning Oracle as a forward-looking tech brand.
